Puzzle Pieces
by gloryblastit
Summary: Amy plans to dump Sheldon and comes to Penny for advice.
1. Chapter 1

Everything seemed neatly laid out, she was with Leonard, Amy was with Sheldon, Howard and Bernadette were married. Only Raj was without someone, but she had heard that he met a socially awkward little bird of a girl at the comic book store and that something might develop. It was neat. Tidy. Everyone was with the person who made sense for them. She liked when things kind of happened that way, when the pieces of the puzzle fell into place and the picture on the box began to emerge.

"Penny, I need your advice," Amy stood in her living room, and Penny peered at her through her almost drunk eyes. She was still drinking a little more than was good for her, and she wasn't exactly sure why. She was with Leonard, and that made her happy. She wasn't constantly excited or turned on but she was a mellow kind of happy, and maybe that was a part of growing up, leaving childish things behind. Leonard was nice, thoughtful, stable, smart. What more could she want? She finished her current glass of wine and stumbled to the kitchen to get another. What more could she want?

"Oh?" she said, knowing it would be advice about her and Sheldon and their relationship, because this was the only area anyone considered her advice worthy of obtaining. She had a doctorate in relationships, she thought, and giggled.

"Yes, I recognize that you have much more experience in this area than I do, so I would value any recommendations you could give me," Amy stood near the couch, swaying back a little. Amy wasn't drunk, she only drank when Penny instigated it. Penny took a healthy swallow of her wine, a cheap white, because she had found that reds caused a worse hangover in the morning. It must be the tannins.

She looked at Amy, taking in her layered clothes, a shirt and a sweater over it, a skirt and tights and school girl shoes. She took in the long light brown hair parted in the middle. In one acting class or another one of the teachers had said that if you were going to part your hair in the exact center you had better have a Covergirl face. Penny had been parting her hair slightly off center since then.

She hoped Amy wasn't going to ask about some sexual thing she was planning on doing to Sheldon. She just couldn't imagine any of that. She thought of the three times she had hugged Sheldon, exactly three. The first time was after she had sent him and Leonard after her T.V. and Kurt pantsed them. He had been standing slightly behind Leonard wearing white briefs that were showing far too much, but he had cupped his hands protectively over them. She hugged Leonard first, and he leaned in and smelled her hair. Then she hugged Sheldon, and he inhaled sharply and tensed every muscle, and she felt like she was hugging piano wire. At the same time he was puling away, even as her arms were around him. The second time was one of her most treasured memories, and she could cry just thinking of it. It was Christmas and the Leonard Nimoy napkin, and she remembered the awkward way her reached his arms around her, pulling her tentatively close, and she remembered the scent of his light cologne and his antibacterial soap. The third time was after he was pestering her to let him go to Switzerland with Leonard. She wasn't going to let him go, thinking how selfish he was about it, and that damn power point display that he made, insulting her. But then he said something about how important it was to him, and that if she went he just hoped she would appreciate what it meant. There was a certain look in his eyes then, and she could respect what he was saying. It had to do with his field of study that he had devoted his life to, that he had like a million degrees in, and she realized that his power point display, while insulting, hadn't really been intended that way. He meant that he should go and in his mind those were the reasons why. So she relented and said she would talk to Leonard, and he ran over to her and hugged her, pulling her to him, and she couldn't help feeling his taunt muscles underneath those ridiculous T-shirts he wore.

"Okay, what's up?" she said to Amy, thinking of those hugs.

"How can I dump someone without breaking their heart?"

Penny fell into one of the bar stools in her kitchen, her wine splashing a bit in the oversized glass but not a drop was lost. She was that good.

"What do you mean? Are you planning on dumping Sheldon?" Her mouth was slightly open. If Amy did that it would disrupt their perfect puzzle and all the pieces getting into the right places. If Amy did that it would disrupt everything.


	2. Chapter 2

Penny felt the alcohol eroding her reason and wished she hadn't drank so much for this conversation, but she didn't know Amy was going to drop this bombshell on her. She swirled her wine and watched the light play on it, dropping down through all the layers.

"You want to dump Sheldon?"

"Yes," Amy said, stepping forward until she stood at the counter in Penny's kitchenette. Penny tried to imagine how this would go. What would Sheldon do, how would he react? She knew how Leonard would react, the tearful trembling of his lower lip, the look in his eyes of devastation. But she couldn't quite imagine Sheldon's reaction.

"Why?" she said, sipping her wine, tasting bitter grapes.

"Well, I suppose it has to do with the fact that I want more sexually than Sheldon can provide. He either does not have the desire or capacity or is not at the same "place" in the relationship as I am. I am not sure of the exact causes of the discrepancy in where we are in this regard, but the causes are not important to the result. The result is that I am somewhat dissatisfied with this part of our relationship and have found myself unable to wait, so the best course of action seems to be termination,"

Penny noticed how Amy spoke of her relationship with Sheldon as though it were an experiment in the lab. That was how Sheldon spoke of most things. They seemed so perfect for each other, but she did see Amy's point. She saw Amy's longing for something approaching a normal relationship, and her frustration as it just wasn't coming to pass. She stifled another giggle. She could have told her this would happen.

"So we have arrived back to my original query. How can I accomplish this without breaking his heart?"

Penny licked her lips, downed the rest of her wine. She felt her eyes almost brimming with tears. There was no way. There were no magic words to soften the blow. The other person, in this case Sheldon, would react however he would react, and nothing Amy did after the fact would change it one bit. She could say they could still be friends, that she valued him as someone in her life and with whom she had a relationship, she could tell him it was her and not him, she could say she loved him but was not in love with him. None of it would work. Amy was so smart in so many things, but Penny could see, even through her drunken haze, that she was just a novice with relationships.

"You can't," Penny said softly.

"What do you mean?" Amy said, gripping the edge of her counter tightly.

"I mean you can't. If you dump him then he'll react however he's going to, and you can't change it. It becomes his thing. It becomes you breaking up with him, and that's his to deal with however he will. I mean, do you still want to be friends with him?"

"Of course. I valued our friendship before we entered into this relationship paradigm, and I would very much like to continue that, although I'm not sure it's possible. I thought, Penny, I thought you would know some secret way to soften the blow of a break up,"

"Sorry," she said, sliding off the bar stool, rinsing her glass in the sink. She felt just on the edge of sick. Maybe puking would make her feel better. Maybe it was too late for that.

"When are you planning on doing this?" she said, envying Amy for the moment, because she wasn't drunk and starting to spin. And she envied the fact that she was willing to cut Sheldon loose because things weren't how she wanted them, and she envied the fact that she could be so clear headed as to realize what it was she wanted. Penny wasn't sure what it was she wanted anymore, and she felt a dull confusion when she thought of Leonard and their relationship. To Amy her relationship with Sheldon was like some object that didn't work right, and since it didn't seem like it could be fixed she was ready to toss it. But her relationship with Leonard wasn't so obvious. It was like a river, sparkling in the sun or gray/green on cloudy days, but what was under the currents? Healthy fish and river weeds or medical waste and algae?

"Soon, I'm not sure, but in the next day or so," Amy said, and Penny nodded, wondering if she should be home when she did it, wondering if Sheldon would come to her for some kind of comfort, a psychic singing of "Soft Kitty". She almost hoped that he would. Thinking of Amy breaking up with him, she realized how she missed him. She missed how things had been before Amy had come into the picture. She didn't see Sheldon as often as she used to, now that he went places with Amy and tended to fill his free time with her. She missed those moments of fighting with him over some silly rule he had, she missed doing laundry with him and having him lecture her about something obscure. She missed playing Halo with all the guys, but it was Sheldon's reaction to her skill that amused her most, how upset he would get over losing. She missed him, period, and was a tiny part of her looking forward to having him back?

She walked past Amy to sit on the couch, feeling the room begin to sway in ernest now. The couch seemed a safer place to be if she was going to fall, or puke, or pass out. The kitchen was filled with sharp and hard surfaces. She was a careful drunk, and she knew the danger of kitchens and bathrooms to the body that was losing consciousness and falling through space. There was probably some physics equation all about it. She laughed, although the sound didn't contain much joy, before she slumped over and passed out, her head resting on the arm of the couch.


	3. Chapter 3

She awoke in the same spot that she had passed out in, and the sun that found its way to her closed eyelids was causing her pain. She groaned and felt her tongue against the roof of her mouth, it felt thick and fuzzy and barely like a human tongue at all. She knew if she moved her head it would cause bright spikes of pain. She had once seen the artwork done by migraine sufferers, and there was one where the woman's face was coming apart like shards of a broken mirror. That is how her head would feel if she moved it.

She shouldn't be drinking so much. It was always making her sick. The person in their little group that she truly envied in this regard was Sheldon, because he so rarely drank. He didn't need the artificial warmth and happiness it could provide. He didn't feel the intense pleasure at the sight of a full glass of wine or a cocktail swirling in on its own colors.

She had to move. She lifted her head and groaned again, the pain coming in pulses. Maybe it followed her heartbeat, every beat of her heart shot pain into her head. She made the promises she always made, maybe to the God she had imagined as a little girl going to church amid the scorching corn fields, maybe to her inner being, her better self. She promised she would never drink again, never, never, never. She wouldn't drink and she wouldn't sneak a cigarette on her break at work and she wouldn't eat the left over cheesecake that was sitting on the greasy card table in the back room at work, and she wouldn't gorge herself on the pizza and chinese food that Leonard and Sheldon bought. She would be her best self, starting now.

She stood up and swayed, the sun shooting piercing little daggers at her eyes and the soft exposed places of her flesh. She needed water and coffee and bread, a bagel or an English muffin, something to absorb all the excess alcohol.

She poured herself a full glass of water and forced herself to drink it, it tasted like metal. She toasted an English muffin and smeared it with butter, took a bite. It was Monday, her day off. She had the whole day to herself, until Leonard would arrive home from work and invade her day. She remembered what Amy had told her about Sheldon and wondered if she would break up with him today.

She thought about breaking up with Leonard. She had done it before. It wasn't right, or maybe she just couldn't figure out what was wrong. She shook her head, blond waves and curls bouncing around her cheeks. What was wrong?

Hours later the hangover had dissipated, and she showered and got dressed just like she was a normal person. She wouldn't drink today, even though the thought had crawled into her brain the second the hangover released its hold on her. She wouldn't drink because she didn't want to feel like spun glass tomorrow morning. She wouldn't drink because she thought that Amy might try and break Sheldon's heart and she wanted to be clear headed it he came to her. It would be either her or Leonard, if he had sufficient self awareness to know that he was hurt. He might not. She remembered that when his friendship with Amy had ended a few years ago he had bought a million cats and called it a day.

She drank more water and it had begun to lose that metallic taste. She thought staying hydrated was a good idea. She watched T.V. despite thinking she should clean. Cleaning was boring, but she liked being in a clean space. How much was the T-shirt clinging to the arm of the couch really bothering her? How much was the dishes that had piled up in the sink really bothering her? How much was her rumpled, unmade bed bothering her?

When her phone rang she knew it was Leonard before she looked.

"Hello?" she said.

"Hi, it's me. Want to do Indian tonight?" he said, and she thought of the lamb vindaloo and nan and wondered if it was nutritious as well as delicious.

"Sure, sounds great," she said, and she hung up and went back to watching T.V. and not cleaning, and thinking just one glass of wine wouldn't kill her, and wondering if Amy was going to tell Sheldon tonight or some other night.

Leonard knocked at her door but she had heard him coming up the stairs. She opened the door and saw Leonard with the take-out bags in hand, and Raj and Howard were behind him. She smiled at the little bag from McDonald's that Raj held, his preferred meal when the choice was Indian.

"Where's Sheldon?" she said, inhaling the aroma of the Indian curry spices, her mouth starting to water.

"He said he was going over to Amy's tonight," Leonard said, juggling the bags while he fumbled for the apartment key.

"Really? On a Monday night?" Penny said. Everyone knew that Sheldon and Amy's date night was Thursday.

"Yeah, weird, right?" Leonard said, getting the apartment door open and narrowly avoiding dropping all of the bags in his hands.

"Yeah," Penny said, knowing that it would be tonight. Amy had asked him over there like an innocent little lamb being lead to the slaughter.

It was all she could think about as she ate her vindaloo with basmatti rice and downed two glasses of water in the process. She had never had Indian food before the day she met Sheldon and Leonard, she hadn't known such spicy and exotic food existed. As she bit into her nan bread, still somehow spicy even though it was just bread, she wondered what Amy was saying to Sheldon at that moment.


	4. Chapter 4

She fidgeted in her seat, watched the boys clean up all the empty and half empty take out boxes. She watched them set up the video games and become absorbed, she watched the minutes on the clock tick by, and still Sheldon had not returned. Would it be tonight?

She yawned, feigned tiredness, said she had to go. She stood up and kissed Leonard, leaning down and over him as he glanced away from the T.V. screen for the briefest of moments.

Back in her apartment the wine beckoned softly from the fridge but she wouldn't heed its call. No wine tonight. She had to be sober tonight.

She listened to the sounds in the hall, waiting to hear his footsteps on the stairs. She felt so nervous for him, so twisted up inside thinking Amy had hurt him. He wouldn't react like Leonard, he wouldn't cry and look like a puppy dumped off on the side of the road, he wouldn't listen to music in the keys of A and D, sad guitar strings and plaintive voices singing out pain. She strained her ears to hear him in the hall.

She heard the footsteps on the stairs, she heard them stop while he dug out his key and she went to her door and opened it. Sheldon was riffling through his pockets and pulled out his key ring, his head down.

"Sheldon," she said, and he turned, straightened up, looked at her.

"Oh, hello, Penny," he said, and he didn't sound upset, he didn't look like he'd just been dumped, his eyes weren't red from tears he couldn't stop.

"Want to come over for a bit, I…I want to talk to you," she said.

"It's late," he said, glancing at the closed door of his apartment.

"Yeah, well, you don't have to stay long," she said, shifting form one foot to the other, feeling the tiniest bit of pride that she hadn't had anything to drink.

"Okay," he said, with one last longing look at his apartment door. He followed her inside.

She poured herself some tea, smelling the slight aromatic chamomile.

"Want some tea?" she said. He stood near her in the tiny kitchenette, and she noticed the flash T-shirt under his windbreaker.

"Yes, with honey," he said, and sat down on the barstool. He expected a hot beverage when visiting someone. It was one of the rules of etiquette. There were many and she hadn't quite learned them all.

She poured him some tea and searched in her cabinets for the little jar of honey. With her back to him she said, "How did it go at Amy's?"

She turned back to him, spooning in some honey and watching it dissolve in little strings and gobs, the deep golden hue being absorbed by the tea. His face was calm, her question not seeming to stir up any emotion at all. Maybe Amy had backed off, reconsidered.

"Fine. Except she broke off our relationship,"

"She did?"

"Well, she said she no longer wanted a boyfriend/girlfriend relationship with me but that we could return to being friends, and since it won't change very much I agreed. I didn't like having to hold her hand at the movies or always having to have date night on Thursday, and I didn't like having to go with her to certain events when there were other things I would rather be doing,"

"Are you upset at all?" she said, sipping her tea, peering into his large blue eyes.

"Not really,"

This blew her away. When her relationships had ended, no matter how aggravating the guy had been, how thoughtless, how boring, she was upset. She cried until her eyes turned that funny hazel green and her mascara ran. She drank, she ate ice cream, she watched stupid T.V. shows, she felt things. Why didn't he?

"Sheldon, this isn't really normal. She dumped you, you should feel upset, or at least you should feel something,"

"Why? Nothing has really changed except certain things I didn't like anyways. She was very logical about it, it made sense to change the paradigm of our relationship to a form that is more functional. We're still friends, we'll still see each other,"

She sipped more of her tea. Maybe he was right, it just made sense for them. But it was still a form of rejection, it was still something that should effect him.

Rejection. It had never sat well with her. She didn't like when guys would brush her off, cast her aside, she didn't like hearing that someone wanted to be just friends when they could have her, the whole package, heart and soul, her endless attention. It was funny that she had wanted to be an actress, a career path that was built on a foundation of rejection.

"Alright, but if you start buying a ton of cats or something like that, you can come and talk to me if you're getting upset, or confused, or anything,"

He smiled at her then, his rare genuine smile, and she saw his slightly crooked and off center teeth.

"I don't think that will be necessary, Penny, but thank you," he said, finished his tea, and stood up to go. She wanted to hug him, but she had learned to curb her physical nature around him.

He left and she was alone again, staring at her empty teacup, hearing the faint call of the wine. Faint, little whispers, filling her ears. She opened her fridge and saw the half full wine bottle, the pale yellow color of the wine just visible above the label. What would one tiny glass hurt?

Really, what would it hurt?


	5. Chapter 5

One little tiny glass of wine, so small you could hardly see it. So small, so insignificant. It was like a glass of wine in a doll's house, a little glass of wine being drunk by a little doll.

She sipped it and it didn't taste bad, it wasn't great for cheap white wine, but it wasn't bad. She had been proud of not drinking today, waiting for Sheldon to come home in tears and some kind of emotional turmoil, but that hadn't happened. He was fine. He was perfectly fine, but was she?

Was she? What was she doing? She dove into some kind of alcohol at the end of each and every single day, she looked forward to it despite puking, despite hangovers, despite not following her dreams, despite becoming nothing. Despite all of that, or maybe because of it, she wanted to sip a nice glass of something at the end of her bitter and disappointing days, that's what she wanted.

She brought her glass of wine over to the couch, flipped on the T.V. and took a long swallow. Amy saw something that wasn't working in her relationship with Sheldon and she fixed it, she fixed it by eradicating it. Amy was ruthless. Was there something wrong with her relationship with Leonard? Was there something wrong that was hard to see and therefore hard to eradicate?

She sipped and felt the warmth spread through her limbs and when the glass was empty she poured herself another. She had expected or hoped for Sheldon to be upset, but maybe it wasn't Sheldon who was upset at all, maybe it was her. Maybe she was upset at not being able to end things with Leonard, maybe she had wanted Sheldon to feel her emotions for her. She laughed at herself. What sense did that make? Sheldon might feel emotions but he rarely expressed them in any way that made sense to her.

Maybe she was envious of Amy because she did what she felt was right for her without worrying about Sheldon. Amy didn't worry about him, that was her, she was the one who stayed sober and listened for his footsteps on the stairs. She was the one who couldn't break up with Leonard because she was too concerned with what he would feel and how he would react to cause any reaction at all. Where was she in all of this? Where had she gone? She drank her second glass of wine down to the stem of the glass and poured herself a third, hoping to forget where she had gone after all.

She woke up on the couch, her back aching low, her mouth dry, her head lightly thumping. As far as hangovers went this one wasn't too bad, it wasn't a screaming piercing freight train of a hangover. It was like a tiny silver hammer tapping on the outside of her skull.

She scrubbed her face until her cheeks were pink. She brushed her teeth until her gums bled. She wanted to get all the remnants of that hangover off of her. She blinked her green eyes at herself in the bathroom mirror. She thought maybe she had wanted Sheldon to be upset so she could comfort him, so she could make the world make sense for him again, so she could feel needed and useful somehow. He hadn't needed her.

Did she have Amy's courage? She didn't think so. She rinsed the plates and the empty wine glass, placed them neatly in the dishwasher. She should be at auditions or in acting classes or in workshops, if she was really serious about this, which of course she wasn't. She had been the most beautiful girl in her Nebraska town and she thought she'd so easily get to be on T.V. or in the movies out here. She didn't realize that her beauty wasn't rare, and that in L.A. it was coupled with talent so fierce you could see it burning in their eyes. Had she purposefully drawn back from auditions and dropped out of her workshop classes, telling herself she'd sign up again when she had more money? How many lies had she told herself? How many of these lies included Leonard? And Sheldon? Didn't she feel a little thrill of excitement when Sheldon trapped her in his blue eyed stare? He didn't know what he was doing, anything that he did was accidental, making it more exciting. Did she want what Amy had so carefully thrown away?

She didn't know. She didn't seem to know anything anymore. The facts were that she was a waitress with limited prospects dating someone who she really preferred to be friends with. The facts were that she wondered what it would be like to kiss Sheldon, to tilt her head up to his and to feel his lips on hers. She wondered what it would feel like to have his long fingers touching her, trailing along her inner arm and making her shiver.

Maybe she'd call Amy up and go out to dinner and a club with her tonight and pick her brain, find out how she could just get rid of Sheldon like she was throwing out last season's shoes. She wanted to ask her how it was that she didn't anticipate his pain and then feel it like her own. She wanted to ask her how she could go about breaking it off with Leonard and not being sucked in by those puppy dog eyes, that pleading expression behind his thick framed glasses.


	6. Chapter 6

Amy smiled over her plate of spaghetti at the Olive Garden. She didn't care that she had dumped Sheldon, she wasn't worrying about his reaction, his emotions, his fragile state of mind. That's all she would be doing if she did the same to Leonard. She chewed on her breadsticks and sipped from her glass of white wine. The thing she really feared was that if she dumped Leonard, they would no longer be able to be friends.

She would get no answers from Amy, she could see that now. How could she have thought that? What did Amy's relationship with Sheldon have to do with her relationship with Leonard?

The meal was carb heavy, and she didn't like that. She was thinking she could change everything. She could quit alcohol and all the empty calories it contained, she could quit her carb and bread heavy diet and return to lean meats and raw vegetables. She could go for runs in the morning instead of sleeping off hangovers and watching mindless morning talk shows. She could go for runs and not stop for a donut when she was hungry afterward.

Those things were so concrete, things she could actually do, things she used to do. She could cut down her hours at the Cheesecake Factory and sign up for actors' workshops, she could buy books on the theories and practices of acting. She could wrap a newfound talent around herself like a second skin, a skin made of iron and lead, a skin no one could penetrate. That way when she went on auditions and heard the bored yet polite "no thank you's" she wouldn't be hurt. Nothing could hurt the warrior wrapped in all their armor. She would lift herself up from the battlefield and try again, samurai sword in her pale hand.

She remembered when Sheldon had asked her for acting lessons, he'd wanted them to help him give lectures. She remembered that he had read three books the night before in preparation of her lessons. Three books! Three books for two days of lessons. He wasn't going to be an actor, he'd wanted some tips to help with his teaching, and he'd read three books about it! It made her feel small and unprepared. This was what she wanted to do for her life, her life, and she didn't even prepare as much as Sheldon did for two lousy little lessons. Did it matter that he was such a genius? Was that the only difference? He had two doctorates and master degrees in physics, he studied and committed himself to what he did, so why couldn't she?

She shook her head and looked at the un-drunk half of her glass, the liquid a pale yellow, shimmering under Olive Garden lights. She wanted to be done with Leonard. She wanted to remain friends but if that wasn't possible than it wasn't, and she'd have to accept that. She wanted to try for something with Sheldon, even if it was only a deepening of their friendship. She wanted to lose weight because she was simply eating too much of the wrong things. And she wanted to start being serious about acting, not cowering away from it because the rejections were hurting her like tiny poison arrow darts digging into her skin. She had to find out if she could do it, and if she couldn't she needed to know that, too. She came here for that. She moved from corn farms and brown dirt and football players and meth labs and her mother's wide yet disapproving face to Pasadena, California, which was close to Hollywood, to make a dream come true. How silly. How much it sounded like the idea of a 12 year old. But she was here in the heat and the hazy sun and the plastic surgery, women's faces looking like strange elderly dolls, surprised dolls as the facelifts cracked. She had to make that dream come true or watch it crack and break, worse than something broken, it would be something that was never real in the first place.

How much of this could she say to Amy? Not much of it. Amy, like Sheldon and Leonard and Howard and Bernadette, knew what she was doing as an adult and had years of education and degrees to back her up. Was that why she hung around with scientific geniuses instead of flighty aspiring actors? Was it because they all knew what they were doing and there was a concreteness to it? There were facts, there were truths, there wasn't some bored casting director's opinion. If Sheldon came up with some sort of theory about atoms or waves or particles or whatever and Leonard could prove that theory than it was a fact, a truth. What was the truth about what one guy in a director's chair liked or didn't like?

She'd start tonight. She'd go for a run, despite the heavy Italian food sloshing around inside of her stomach. She'd break up with Leonard in the morning and she'd weather his puppy dog eyes and tears. She'd find that elusive workshop that would teach her the secrets that would land her roles. And she'd ask Sheldon to do something with her, something he liked, and she'd see how their friendship weathered the isolation of his relationship with Amy. Maybe there would be the tiny hope of something more.


End file.
